


The Queen's Champion

by janjanfollower



Category: Critical Role (Web Series)
Genre: Gen, dream fic, spoilers for e46
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-04-01
Updated: 2016-04-01
Packaged: 2018-05-30 12:14:19
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 845
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6423523
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/janjanfollower/pseuds/janjanfollower
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It feels like years have passed since Vax is able to get a good night's sleep. When he gets to a soft bed and has a warm hearth, he can't help but let his body submit to its needs.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Queen's Champion

**Author's Note:**

> Full disclosure: I am a Massive fan for dream fics. My friend, Reese, who I've inundated with countless dream pieces, can attest to this. And so long as Matt Mercer keeps writing really fantastic dream sequences, I'll keep writing dream sequence fanfics.

He thinks he hears something.

Is he in a chamber? A chasm, a tunnel? He doesn't know, he can't even see his hand in front of his face, he isn't even totally sure his eyes are open, but he hears an echo of a voice, a woman, a yell, refract against the air, the walls.

He think it's Vex. Or maybe Keyleth? His mother, a scream of death he's never heard?

His feet fall, they don't carry his weight anymore as they fail in function and he feels the light brush of a bird feathers graze the skin around his neck before air rushes back against his body, entering a free fall.

He flips himself around, feeling air wash over his face now, and he sees how black is broken by a tangled web of iridescent, shimmering threads, almost golden in this pitch-colored void. As stable as it looks, it looks nearly like a golden fabric, he knows at the speed he's going (by how the feathers of his given armor scrape and threaten to cut at his skin) that he's going to crash through, the cushion guaranteed to be broken by him.

As the thought occurs though however, his body slows, and he's brought upright onto the fabric, feet supporting his frame once more. A moment of unbroken silence, and Vax can't help but look. The light of the fabric is clear, its radiance obvious, but as he looks down at his feet he notices how they don't light up his ankles, his boots. But he notices how his tunic shines brightly, its etched runes casting highlight to make the leather appear truly priceless and the feathers coloring the neckline beam in green and violet.

He feels like a dust mote on a shirt, a small fly on the grand marble floor of the Emon foyer. Insignificant, tiny, and merely a blip, a disturbance, in the seamlessness of the big picture.

He sees the hand appear from the shadows behind him before he sees a long thread standing up to his eye level, having unraveled itself from its web. The thread stands identical to the rest, pulsing like his throat in this panic, and he sees the hand; fine, thin, long, but also decomposed somehow, looking to belong to a freshly-deceased corpse. His eyes follow the arm, watching it scale impossibly long until he turns around and sees the figure.

It looks like the shadow he saw in the Raven Queen's champion's crypt. The frame is identical, despite the first time he saw it was shrouded in smoke and lack of light, but here she stands truly reflected by the glow that seems to ignore him. She towers over him, a frame of a woman, her hair no longer weightless and disintegrating into raven feathers but now pin-straight, only visible by the sheen it gains against the gold flooring, her raven feathered cloak hiding any details of her color and identity while keeping her visible, the cloak seemingly made of smoke as it encircles him, tombs him, into a developing cage of the Queen's doing. Her face, unlike before where only white lights stood for her face, is a mask, a white porcelain that sends chills of horror down his spine. Its placidness makes his mouth dry.

Was he scared when his body was frozen, watching the necromancer of a Briarwood sulk towards him as a beast of a vampire stood behind him, preventing his escape, locking him to his death? That is a candle to a forest fire.

He watches as the Queen's head turns from him to the thread she holds, and he is nothing less but compelled to follow her gaze. He watches as her wrist flicks up for only a barest of a second, tugging the thread just barely, before he feels the floor quake and shiver under him. As he looks down, he watches the fabric wave through, never-ending, its effect never stopping.

There is no sound in this world, no echo of noise, but he hears her words as he hears his thoughts. It's smooth, aired, but cold and distant. She speaks with a factual knowledge, not an exposition.

_This is you, my champion. You are fate-touched. The choice is yours. Rebirth, or ruin. Maker, or martyr. Conquerer, tyrant, or..._

He hears with his ears, noise vibrating to enter his senses, a pluck of a thread.

_Nothing._

The fabric unravels faster that he could process, because he sees the Raven Queen quickly rise out of his vision, and when he looks up he can see the underside of the great fabric, still rippling from earlier, hundreds of miles away from where he sees the black hole in the center where his feet once stood.

His heart is in his throat as it takes that brief half-second to realise he's falling once more. His muscles stiff up, he plummets, he's back under the city of Whitestone as he feels his thoughts turn grey, taint wrong, the panic that laid under that calmness back in that time, and then...

Nothing.

**Author's Note:**

> This was finished two hours after the episode ended. I may have a problem, and chances are that problem is called 'insomnia'. 
> 
> Hope you enjoyed.


End file.
